Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Life

Karl Marx was born in May 5, 1818 in Trier (Rheinish
Prussia). His father, Herschel Marx, was a lawyer, a Jew who adopted
Protestantism. After graduating from a Gymnasium in Trier, Marx entered the
university, studied jurisprudence at Bonn, and transferred the next year to
Berlin. However his preoccupation with philosophy turned him away from law. In
Berlin, he joined the circle of young Hegelians called the Doktorenclub
(Doctors Club), which consisted of Bauer, Strauss, Feuerbach. They are also
called the “left Hegelians”, and the greatest part of their attention was
devoted to the Hegelian philosophy (McLellan 1973, 32).

After graduating, Marx moved to Bonn, he hoped to become a
lecturer in philosophy. However, the policy of the government refused to allow
him to return to the university, and in 1841, Bruno Bauer, who was member of
Doctors Club, was forbidden to lecture to Bonn due to his radical views. This
led to Marx to abandon the idea of an academic career, and he began his long
career as a journalist (McLellan 1973, 34; 40).

At 1842, Marx began to write his critical article about
the institutions of Prussian ‘Christian State’ in an opposition paper,
Rheinische Zeitung. Marx and Bruno Bauer were invited to be the chief
contributors, and in October 1842 Marx became a chief editor and moved from Bonn
to Cologne. The newspaper’s revolutionary-democratic trend became more and more
pronounced under Marx’s editorship, and the government imposed strong censorship
on the paper. The censorship was so intolerable that Marx preferred to resign on
17 March. The final issue of the paper appeared on the 31st of that month. His
criticism of the deliberations of the Rhein Province Assembly compelled Marx to
study questions of economic and political interests. In pursuing them, he found
that jurisprudence and philosophy overlooked the material conditions of life.
Many years later, Marx wrote in the preface of Critique of Political Economy:

The first work which I undertook
for the solution of the doubts which assailed me was a critical review of the
Hegelian philosophy of law…My investigation led to the conclusion, firstly, that
legal relations as well as forms of state are to be understood neither in
themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but
rather have their roots in the material conditions of life; secondly that the
anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy (McLellan, 1973,
67).

In the summer of 1843, Marx married Jenny von Westphalen,
a childhood friend to whom he had become engaged while he was still a student.
In the fall of the same year, Marx went to Paris, and devoted his study to
political economy and the history of the French Revolution. At the same time, he
published a radical journal abroad, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbucher.However, this was the first and last issue of this journal.

In September 1844, Frederick Engels came to Paris for a
few days, and from that time on became Marx’s closest friend. Engels was the son
of a wealthy industrialist but had been under the influence of both the radical
Hegelians in Germany and the English socialists.

At the insistent request of the Prussian government, Marx
was banished from Paris in 1845, as a dangerous revolutionary. He went to
Brussels, and stayed there, pursuing the same studies. In 1845 in Brussels, he
wrote one of his major works, Theses on Feuerbach, which were published
by Engels. This work and The German Ideology, written with Engels in
1845-1846, indicate Marx’s discontinuity with the young Hegelians and the
emergence of his own social and economical critique of religion (McLellan 1973,
152; 154).

In the spring of 1847, Marx and Engels joined a secret
propaganda society called the Communist League. After that time, they drew up
The Communist Manifesto,which was written in London in 1848, and
adopted by the Workers’ Congress. In 1864, Marx founded the International, which
is also called First International, and in 1867, Capital: A Critique of
Political Economy appeared. If it had not been for Engels’ constant and
selfless financial aid, Marx would not have been able to concentrate on writing
Capital. Engels published its second and third volumes in 1885 and 1894
after his death (Livingston, 188). This work contains the results of studies to
which a whole life was devoted. It is the political economy of the working
class, reduced to its scientific formulation. Through this work, Marx attempts
to show the relation between capital and labor. Marx’s health was undermined by
his strenuous work in the International and his still more strenuous theoretical
occupations. He continued work on the refashioning of political economy and on
the completion of Capital, for which he collected a mass of new material
and studied a number of languages. However, ill health prevented him from
completing Capital.

His wife died on December 2, 1881 and on March 14, 1883
Marx passed away peacefully in his armchair. He lies buried next to his wife at
Highgate Cemetery in London. Marx’s children died in childhood in London, when
the family was living in destitute circumstances.

Theses on Feuerbach (1845);
German Ideology (with Engels, 1845); The Communist Manifesto (with Engels,
1848); Wage-Labor and Capital (1849); Preface to A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy (1859); Capital: A Critique of Political
Economy, Volume 1 (1867); The Civil War in France (1871)

Religion as a Projection of Alienated Consciousness

Marx gets the term ‘alienation’ from Hegel and Feuerbach.
Feuerbach builds his interpretation of Christianity upon the concept of
alienation that lies at the foundation of Hegel’s philosophy. Marx accepts
Hegel’s view that man can be alienated from himself, but he(Marx) rejected the
view that nature is a self-alienated form of the absolute mind. On the contrary,
Feuerbach argues, our idea of God is really just an idea of the human essence,
and the essence of religion is men’s estrangement from himself (Bloch, 83). When
human beings create and put above themselves an imagined higher being, they are
alienated from themselves. Feuerbach says, “ What is positive, essential in the
intuition of the divine being can only be human, so the intuition of man as an
object of consciousness can only be negative, hostile to man. To enrich God, man
must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing”(Feuerbach, 26).
Feuerbach also thinks of alienation as a form of false consciousness, a false
view of the human essence (Livingston, 185-186).

Between 1841-1844, Marx remained a true Feuerbachian, and
his comments on religions during this period reflect Feuerbach’s influence.
However, Marx’s discussion of man’s self-alienation in religion was much more
focused on analysis of the historical and economical factors producing such an
alienated consciousness. In The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
(1844), Marx said that man has found nothing but his own alienated reflection.

Man makes religion; religion does
not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and
self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost
himself. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the
world of man, the state, and society. This state, this society, produces
religion, a reversed world-consciousness because they are a reversed world.
Religion is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human
essence has no true reality (Marx 1964, 41-42).

The religious illusions not only give a sense of the
emptiness and worthlessness of human life, but also offer us comfort and
consolation. Alienated consciousness involves two contradicting ideas: one is
that human life is alienated, unsatisfying and worthless, and the other is that
human existence is not alienated once we give it the right interpretation. Hegel
and Feuerbach argued that people are alienated because they misunderstand the
nature of the human condition (Wood, 13). Marx kept Feuerbach’s ideas of
projection and alienation. Indeed, they appear frequently in Marx’s early
writings. But he saw that Feuerbach’s critique of religion touched only the
theoretical side of alienation; for him, it was necessary to attack the
practical side as well. Because of their own fixation on metaphysics, Hegel and
Feuerbach just saw the half picture of the human condition. Thus Marx moved from
the criticism of heaven to the criticism of earth, from religious alienation to
political and economic alienation (Norris, 19). To eliminate a symptom is not to
eliminate the disease.

Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world…It is the opium of the
people…The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is
required for their real happiness…Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the
criticism of the earth… the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics
(Marx 1964, 42).

Religion as an Ideological Superstructure and Praxis

Marx explores the real origin of religious alienation
itself and finds it in the dehumanized praxis of real social life. Marx’s
criticism of religion is primarily related to social conditions, that is, to the
economic and social alienation of man in a class society as the source of
religion. In contrast with Feuerbach’s anthropology, Marx does not comprehend
the sources of religion to be anthropological and psychological. He does not
regard it as the result of the fear of finitude and projection into other
worldliness. Above all things, he perceives the sources out of which religion
stems as being society and inhuman class conditions.

In this, Marx follows Moses Hess’ analysis, which was the
first to transform Feuerbach’s concept of alienation into a critical analysis of
the economic and social system of capitalism. Hess had established that what
Feuerbach proclaimed to be a religious alienation was only an ideological
expression. He argued that the real alienation of man’s essence was based on the
economic and social level.

The influence of Hess is most pronounced in “On the Jewish
Question.” Marx understood a similarity between the alienation produced by the
capitalist religion and self-alienation produced by Christianity (Livingston,
191). In Marx’s understanding, Christianity and Judaism, which he regarded as
typical of capitalism, are the theoretical and practical forms of man’s egoistic
alienation. Marx argued that, throughout history, religion (Christianity) has
served capitalism as an “ideological” superstructure (Livingston, 192). In
Capital, he shows the affinity of Christianity and capitalism.

The religious world is but the
reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of
commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with
one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they
reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human
labour-for such a society, Christianity… is the most fitting form of religion
(Marx 1964, 135).

According to Marx, alienation is real in which it
consists, not just in people's beliefs and thoughts, but also in their objective
conditions in the world. If we feel our world to be empty and absurd, or feel
ourselves to be degraded, then that is because we are. He concentrates on the
sociopolitical source of man’s distress. In the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts, written in Paris in 1844, Marx described the process of
alienation in the alienated society.

(1) Marx argues that the worker is alienated from his laboring activity,
because it is not the expression of himself but rather a means to prolonging his
physical existence.

(2) The worker is alienated from the product of his labor, because it belongs
to the capitalist and so the worker’s labor increases the power of the
capitalist whose interest is in so many ways opposed to the worker’s.

(3) The worker is alienated from nature.

(4) Most importantly, he is alienated from the human essence, and so from his
fellow human beings (Marx 1963, 127-129).

The self-alienated man is a man who really is not a man.
On the contrary, a non-alienated man would be a man who really is a man. This
man fulfills himself as a free, creative being of praxis. Marx argued that
alienation is real, and we feel our lives to be empty and meaningless because we
live under conditions which make a real life impossible for us (Wood, 14). The
crucial problem is that alienated individuals lack the practical power to take
meaningful action. In the fourth thesis of “Theses on Feuerbach” Marx claims the
necessity of praxis in order to overcome human alienation. The concept of praxis
makes Marx break with Feuerbach.

Feuerbach starts out form the
fact of religious self-alienation, the duplication of this world into a
religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work consists in the dissolution
of the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after
completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done…The latter (secular
basis) must itself…be understood in its contradiction and then, by the
removal of the contradiction, revolutionized in practice (Marx 1959, 244;
emphasis added).

Marx argues that only a “praxis” which transforms economic
circumstances can free man from his alienated condition. Marx understood that
consciousness could not be changed within consciousness alone, but only by
changes in material acts. The misery of human being is not caused by
metaphysical ideas, but by alienated praxis that one can find in the ideological
consciousness. Marx increases the importance of the social dimension of human
existence based on the critique of religion as ideology. He concentrates on the
social relation that is the point of intersection of political and economic
relations, not an abstract relation. Marx concludes: “The struggle against
religion is therefore mediately the fight against the other world, of which
religion is the spiritual aroma…The demand to give up the illusions about
its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The
criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe,
the halo of which is religion” (Marx 1964, 42). In this light, we can understand
the statement: “The criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”

Remembering Marx

One can say that Marx’s thought is congenial to Christian
belief in some senses. Marx’s explanations of alienation and emancipation have a
quite similar structure to the Christian ideas of sin and redemption. The
hopeful future-oriented quality of this thought sounds familiar to the hope of
the gospel.

Yet despite these formal similarities and positive
critique of religion, the materialist orientation of Marx’s thinking based on
atheism is a particular obstacle to Christian interpretation. Marx’s materialism
raises an important challenge to Christian belief. If Marx was one-sidedly
materialistic, Christianity traditionally has been one-sidedly
anti-materialistic.

Even though it seems to be true that atheism is so
essential to Marxism that Marxist goals cannot be achieved without it, if we
defined Marxism as a social theory, the role played by his atheism becomes much
less important. This is the starting point where Christians and Marxists (or
Christian-Marxists) seek the same goal, which is the liberation from any type of
human bondage. In this understanding, we can find various connections between
Christianity and Marxism in liberation theology.

Marx’s condemnations of religion have a permanent validity
and value when it acts to legitimize unjust structures or to pacify the
oppressed. These censures have challenged Christianity and encouraged churches
to be involved in issues of social justice. Many Christians who are motivated to
work for social justice may not opt for Marxist revolutionary change, but they
would agree that the theology has only interpreted God, human beings, and the
world in various ways; but what matters is to change them.